--- title: "The State That Isn’t Building" url: https://australianproperty.network/analysis/construction-development-pipeline-analysis/the-state-that-isnt-building/ date: 2026-09-02 modified: 2026-09-13 lang: en author: "APN National" description: "Four years of ABS approvals data show Australia's two biggest states building barely more homes than they did in 2022, while Western Australia's per-capita rate has climbed every single year. New South Wales' own migration numbers suggest why." categories: - "Construction & Development Pipeline Analysis" tags: - "21510" - "building approvals" - "Internal Migration" image: https://australianproperty.network/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Building-Approvals-2-sept-2026.webp word_count: 2342 --- # The State That Isn’t Building Australia approved 53,952 new dwellings in the June quarter of 2026 — the strongest quarter on record in the four years of comparable data, and on the surface a good-news headline for a country in the middle of a housing affordability crisis. A building approval is simply a council or private certifier signing off on a proposed dwelling before construction starts; it is the earliest visible signal of future housing supply, months or years before a resident moves in. Break the national total down by state and adjust it for population, and the story splits in two. Western Australia's approval rate per resident has risen every single year for four consecutive years. New South Wales and Victoria — the two largest housing markets in the country — are approving fewer homes per person today than they were four years ago. #### Four years, two trajectories The clearest way to see the divergence is to strip out population size entirely and look at approvals per 10,000 residents, financial year by financial year, since July 2022. Every state dipped through FY23-24, the trough of the interest-rate tightening cycle. What happened next is where the states split. ##### Dwelling approvals per 10,000 residents, by state, FY22-23 vs FY25-26 FY22-23FY25-26 (current)63.4260.58NSW82.4278.51VIC66.2384.60QLD68.1779.41SA49.5583.84WA52.6346.54TAS23.3131.86NT Approvals per 10,000 residents, population measured at the start of each financial year. Source: ABS 8731.0 Building Approvals (national and LGA small-area supplements) and ABS Regional Population by LGA, reconstructed to financial-year population levels — see methodology note. Western Australia climbed in every one of the four years measured — 49.55, then 59.92, then 76.78, then 83.84 per 10,000 residents — overtaking New South Wales in FY23-24 and closing in on Queensland's national lead by FY25-26. Queensland and South Australia both dipped through the rate-hike trough and then climbed sharply out of it. New South Wales and Victoria did the opposite: both are sitting below where they started four years ago, despite a real recovery off their own FY23-24 lows. Tasmania is the outlier within the outliers — its trough actually came a year later than everyone else's, in FY24-25 (40.40, below even its FY23-24 figure), and even its partial recovery to FY25-26 leaves it well below where it started. The two-point comparison above understates how different the four shapes actually are. Plotting all four years shows Queensland and Western Australia arriving at almost the same destination (84.60 and 83.84 per 10,000 respectively) by two completely different routes — Queensland via a genuine dip-and-snap-back, Western Australia via an uninterrupted, four-year straight climb that never dipped even in the worst of the rate-hike trough. That distinction matters for how durable each state's current strength looks: a state that kept climbing through a downturn is telling a different story than one recovering from it. ##### The full four-year path, per 10,000 residents FY22-23FY23-24FY24-25FY25-26WAQLDSAVICNSWTASNT Same source and construction as the chart above, all four financial years plotted. Note Western Australia's uninterrupted climb versus Queensland and South Australia's dip-then-recovery shape — both end near the same level, but only Western Australia never went backwards. #### The scale, in raw numbers The per-capita story isn't a small-numbers illusion. Western Australia's total annual approval volume nearly doubled over the same four years — from 13,856 dwellings in FY22-23 to 25,544 in FY25-26, a rise of 84%. Queensland is up 36%. New South Wales and Victoria, by contrast, approved essentially the same number of dwellings in FY25-26 as they did in FY22-23. +84.4%WA total approvals, FY22-23 → FY25-26 (13,856 → 25,544) +36.4%QLD total approvals, same window (35,176 → 47,969) +0.3%NSW total approvals, same window (51,893 → 52,050) +1.9%VIC total approvals, same window (54,521 → 55,540) Put another way: across the four years, Western Australia and Queensland together added roughly 24,500 dwellings a year to their combined annual approval rate. New South Wales and Victoria, with a combined population more than double Western Australia and Queensland's, added a net 1,176 dwellings a year between them — effectively nothing, once ordinary year-to-year noise is accounted for. #### The latest quarter confirms it, not just the multi-year average The June 2026 quarter isn't an outlier dragging the four-year trend around — it largely restates it. Against the March 2026 quarter, New South Wales and South Australia posted the fastest growth among the larger states (+23.5% and +23.4% respectively) — Tasmania and the Northern Territory moved faster still in percentage terms (below), but off bases too small to read as signal. Queensland grew a strong +15.9%, and Victoria managed a modest +3.8%. Western Australia was the only state to go backwards quarter-on-quarter, down 3.2%. | State | March qtr 2026 | June qtr 2026 | Change | | ----- | -------------- | ------------- | ------ | | NSW | 11,288 | 13,940 | +23.5% | | VIC | 13,603 | 14,124 | +3.8% | | QLD | 10,940 | 12,683 | +15.9% | | WA | 6,692 | 6,477 | −3.2% | | SA | 3,423 | 4,223 | +23.4% | | TAS | 571 | 797 | +39.6% | | NT | 127 | 287 | +126% | Tasmania's and the Northern Territory's large percentage moves sit on small bases and should be read as noisy, not as trend reversals. Western Australia's single-quarter dip, against its four-year climb, reads the same way in reverse — its full financial year (FY25-26) is still the strongest on record for the state. #### A complication: population growth isn't the same everywhere Approvals per resident is a fair way to compare states of different sizes, but it treats every state's population as equally static — and it isn't. Western Australia's population is growing at 2.17% a year; New South Wales' at 1.17%. A state absorbing new residents twice as fast needs to approve homes twice as fast just to stand still. Dividing each state's trailing twelve-month approvals by its actual population growth over the same period — rather than its total population — tells a different, complicating story. ##### Approvals per net new resident, trailing 12 months to June 2026 0.230NT0.386WA0.452VIC0.490QLD0.518NSW0.737SA1.793TAS Dwellings approved per additional resident (natural increase + net internal + net overseas migration, 2024-25). Below 1.0 means approvals are not keeping pace one-for-one with population growth in every state — a level below 1.0 is normal everywhere given not every new resident needs a newly-built dwelling, but the ranking is the point. Source: ABS Building Approvals and ABS Regional Population, 2024-25 components. On this measure, Western Australia and Victoria — not New South Wales — have the lowest approval rate relative to their own population growth. New South Wales, despite its weak per-capita standing above, actually sits mid-table here, because its population is growing more slowly to begin with. This doesn't erase the earlier finding — New South Wales is still building at a lower absolute rate than most of the country — but it reframes Western Australia's story specifically: its approval rate is climbing fast, but its population is growing even faster. Tasmania tops this table for the opposite reason — its population is barely growing at all, so even a declining approval volume still outpaces its new-resident count comfortably. #### Where the pressure shows up: New South Wales' exodus New South Wales presents a specific and separate problem from the national supply story. In the twelve months to June 2025 (the latest available ABS regional population data), New South Wales recorded a net loss of 24,328 residents to other states — by far the worst net internal migration figure of any state or territory in the country, more than ten times the size of the next worst (the Northern Territory, at −2,105). The state's population is still growing overall, but only because net overseas migration (+90,226) is more than backfilling the domestic outflow. Overseas arrivals are replacing the residents the state is losing to the rest of the country, not adding to a stable base. ##### Net internal migration by state, FY2024-25 (residents gained or lost to other states) -24,328NSW-2,105NT-1,877TAS-1,295SA-777VIC10,288WA21,595QLD NSW is highlighted; all other states shown at equal weight for comparison. Source: ABS Regional Population, components of change, FY2024-25. APN Codex's national housing affordability reading gives one plausible reason why residents are leaving. **Housing Affordability Analysis (21180)**, built from national median rent measured against average weekly full-time earnings, has moved from +0.3623σ in the December 2025 quarter to +1.3008σ in March 2026 to **+1.9263σ** in the June 2026 quarter — a sustained deterioration in how much of income Australians are spending on rent nationally. New South Wales sits at the sharp end of that national trend specifically: its own rent-to-income ratio was 64.15% in the June 2026 quarter, the highest of any state with data available, and well above Western Australia (58.32%), Queensland (57.25%) and Tasmania (50.18%). ##### Rent-to-income ratio by state, June quarter 2026 50.2%TAS57.2%QLD58.3%WA64.2%NSW State-level rent-to-income ratio: annualised median rent against FY2023-24 median individual taxable income, by state. Victoria is not covered by this state-level series at all; South Australia's June 2026 update had not yet been published at the time of writing (NIL RETURN, not zero). This series is not part of the certified national reading of Housing Affordability Analysis (21180), which is built from the national figure on a different income measure; it is shown here as supporting state-level context. Put together: New South Wales is not simply under-building relative to its size. It is under-building while its residents pay the highest rent burden in the country and leave for other states in greater numbers than anywhere else in Australia — and the arrivals replacing them are coming from overseas, not from elsewhere in the country. Queensland and Western Australia, by contrast, are the two states gaining the most from that same internal movement — the same two states leading the approvals recovery. That's consistent with a simple mechanism: people are moving toward the states building more, not the other way around, though this dataset can't establish which way the causation runs. #### Who's actually building, suburb by suburb At the individual local government area level, Queensland's south-east corner dominates June 2026's raw approval volumes. Brisbane alone approved 1,421 dwellings in the month, more than the Northern Territory managed for the entire quarter. Gold Coast and Moreton Bay round out the top three. | LGA | Dwellings approved, June 2026 | | --- | ----------------------------- | | Brisbane | 1,421 | | Gold Coast | 1,180 | | Moreton Bay | 596 | | Ku-ring-gai | 428 | | Logan | 415 | | Melton | 394 | | Wyndham | 360 | | Ipswich | 329 | | Wanneroo | 328 | Note the mix: Queensland's south-east corner (Brisbane, Gold Coast, Moreton Bay, Logan, Ipswich) accounts for five of the top nine, but growth-corridor LGAs in Victoria (Melton, Wyndham) and Western Australia (Wanneroo) also feature — a broader spread than a single-state story would suggest. Unincorporated ACT (387 dwellings, which would rank seventh) is omitted here as a territory-wide catch-all rather than a distinct suburb. Raw volume favours big cities simply because they are big. A fairer test is build intensity — approvals over the past twelve months measured against each LGA's existing housing stock. On that measure, the biggest cities disappear from the leaderboard entirely, and Western Australia's growth-corridor LGAs dominate in a way the raw volume table doesn't show at all. ##### Highest build intensity nationally: approvals as a share of existing dwelling stock, trailing 12 months to June 2026 Melton (VIC)7.89%Murray (NSW)7.26%Serpentine-Jarrahdale (WA)6.98%Wollondilly (NSW)6.64%Kwinana (WA)6.22%Playford (SA)5.93%Wanneroo (WA)5.30%Mitchell (VIC)5.25%Augusta Margaret River (WA)4.96%Armadale (WA)4.72% Intensity = trailing-12-month approved dwellings ÷ total private dwelling stock (2021 Census). Restricted to LGAs with a 2021 dwelling stock above 3,000, to exclude very small LGAs where a handful of approvals produces an outlying ratio. Not one capital-city LGA appears in this top ten. Five of the ten highest-intensity LGAs in the country are in Western Australia — Serpentine-Jarrahdale, Kwinana, Wanneroo, Augusta Margaret River and Armadale all rank ahead of every Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane suburb on this measure. Melton, the Victorian growth-corridor LGA that also placed in the raw-volume table above, tops this intensity list outright, with 7.89% of its entire existing housing stock approved for construction in a single year. This is the same pattern [documented elsewhere](https://australianproperty.network/analysis/construction-development-pipeline-analysis/two-booms-one-number/) in outer-suburban growth corridors nationally: high-intensity building concentrated in mortgage-belt fringe LGAs, not inner-city apartment markets. #### What comes next Approvals are the leading edge of housing supply, not the finished product. A growing share of what gets approved still has to clear finance, start construction, and complete — and the states approving the most are not guaranteed to be the states actually delivering the most. The next data point that will start to answer that question is due in early October 2026, when the ABS publishes June-quarter building activity data covering dwelling commencements. Until then, this divergence is a story about paperwork and intentions — a real and useful leading indicator, but one still a step removed from keys in doors. **Methodology note.** National and state quarterly approval figures: [ABS 8731.0 Building Approvals](https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/building-and-construction/building-approvals-australia/latest-release), Table 11, original series, Total Sectors, summed to calendar quarters. State and LGA-level figures: ABS 8731.0 LGA small-area supplement, 558 LGAs, July 2022–June 2026, grouped to state using each LGA's ABS state code. The LGA-level state sum for the June 2026 quarter (53,256) is within 1.3% of the national headline figure (53,952) — a normal small-area-versus-headline margin, not reconciled further here. Financial-year state population figures are not a directly published ABS time series at this grain; they are reconstructed by chaining backward from the 30 June 2025 LGA-level Estimated Resident Population (ABS Regional Population, released 31 March 2026) using each state's financial-year natural increase and net migration components (ABS Regional Population, components of change). Net internal and net overseas migration figures (New South Wales section) are FY2024-25 state totals from the same source. Build-intensity figures use total private dwelling stock from the 2021 Census as the denominator — a five-year-old base that understates current stock more in fast-growing states, a limitation worth weighing but not reconciled further here. State rent-to-income figures are APN-derived: annualised median weekly rent (from state rental bond data, where available) against each state's FY2023-24 median individual taxable income (ATO) — an individual, not household, income base. Housing Affordability Analysis (21180) is live, built at full weight from national median weekly rent measured against average weekly ordinary-time earnings of full-time adults (ABS), with its weighting provisional pending ratification. The state ratios use a different income measure, so they are shown only as supporting context and are not comparable in level with the national reading. Building Approvals & Commencements (21510) is not cited with a certified reading in this piece — its June 2026 quarter certification is pending the release of dwelling commencements data, expected early October 2026. Findings are presented on the basis of data and evidence alone.